FIVB ranking: misstep in the right direction

Tenni Salma (), Gomes de Pinho Zanco Daniel () and Szczecinski Leszek ()
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Tenni Salma: INRS and McGill, Quebec, Canada
Gomes de Pinho Zanco Daniel: Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Montreal, Canada
Szczecinski Leszek: Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Montreal, Canada

Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, 2025, vol. 21, issue 3, 237-252

Abstract: This work presents and evaluates the ranking algorithm that has been used by Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) since 2020. The prominent feature of the FIVB ranking is the use of the probabilistic model, which explicitly calculates the probabilities of the future matches results using the estimated teams’ strengths. Such explicit modeling is new in the context of official sport rankings, especially for multi-level outcomes, and we study the optimality of its parameters using both analytical and numerical methods. We conclude that from the modeling perspective, the current thresholds fit well the data but adding the home-field advantage (HFA) would be beneficial. Regarding the algorithm itself, we explain the rationale behind the approximations currently used and show a simple method to find new parameters (numerical score) which improve the performance. We also show that the weighting of the match results is counterproductive.

Keywords: ranking; FIVB; volleyball; ordinal models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1515/jqas-2024-0128

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